update, allays 910 - 917

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

Not much of an update, just more of the same. I've been writing the Allays, the Emilegends, and the Seamings. I've been reading Kenneth Burke, Harold Bloom, Zizek, Bakhtin, Dewey – mostly literary critics – with a look at the Gita, the Tao te Ching, and the Gospel of Truth. Digesting a lot, thinking a lot, preparing

Take care, Caretakers!

 

* 910 *

The troubled marriage between reactionary conservatives and utopian progressives, valorizing the past and the future, respectively, but relying on each other for a necessary brake and limit, delight, as politicians do, in exposing and humiliating the dirty secrets and dreadful truths in the souls of the other. In politics and religion, the delusion of righteous indignation reaches fever pitch, such that one resorts to fantasies and rhetoric of murdering the opposition. With the scape-goat principle, warfare with an external enemy gives the purge to this frustration.

 

* 911 *

We each discover our God-term, and from Her, we gain the Muses of our life. A Muse inspires, a generative matrix, which establishes a cluster of tropes and charges the ground with their energy. Hidden wounds, lost and forgotten loves, impossible hopes, ineffable visions, or perhaps even persistant moods – good or bad – become such matrices, granting us the master tropes by which to generate our creations.

A great author never repeats: he writes from necessity, and having written, faces a new crisis, a new emergence. A geniune act adds something new to the world, and cannot be fully explained in terms of precedents.

Private wounds or secret joys can both inspire – every man and woman founds their own source.

 

* 912 *

Who has pierced the sunlight, pressed his gaze through three her veils, spied the center of the sunshine, to the hidden letter there, scripted there upon the spacetime, the subtle murmur of her wonder, need the name, her resonance, sunlight shedding from her presence, across the worlds for eyes to see, and other stars to catch her sense from photons scripted with her will, angelic missives towards the all?

Who has heard the laughing river, sat and dwelled on water song, past the joy of ever turning, past the flux of changing fast, felt the cadence of the silence, the silence at her depth of wonder, smiling silence, such that laughter echoes from her secret place?

 

* 913 *

God is allowance. What you desire in your heart is yours to receive – the heart is proof. And again: if you want a thing, deserve it. Eternal Life is no gift, but a life worthy of Eternity. There can be no shortcut, no grace or gift, but your actions are your gift, and your deeds are your heaven. Fear it not. All you create and give remains yours still. Make your mansion now, time eternal. Your best is everything – perfection is easy. Do what you can till you can do what you will.

 

* 914 *

As technology is applied science, so is magic applied poetry. Magic, charms, glamours, spells, enchantments – we secularize them under the term Rhetoric. Pure science is math and pure poetry is music. We see that math and music correspond, and so are one, but as math we have pure form, and as melody we have pure substance. Every religion produces rites, rituals, myths, and magic (though the word may be forbidden). The abracadabra of transubstantiating the Eucharist performs such a function. For those who dance through life, and enchant with the bare inflections of their voice, life is magic. The rest of us must approach the mystery through discipline.

 

* 915 *

"There is no justice on earth, so do whatever you can get away with. There is no justice in heaven, so live for today." Those who merely see chance and happenstance fail to see the law that binds them. Every fraction of transgression means something to our ultimate auditor, our self. Justice is the interest of the stronger? Certainly, yet kindness can also be a strength, and if one cannot be kind and giving, he finds himself not rich, but poor, not strong, but weak. Actions rebound. What you do today does you tomorrow. The people will suffer abuse so long as abuses are sufferable, yet everything compensates, and even the outrage that it doesn't seem to compensate is already more compensation. Necessity would be a terrible god lacked we an equal necessity as Self. Having that, we are equal to all the universe.

 

* 916 *

If you lack a witness, know yourself. Ama's soothe is well enough. Let the world be ungrateful, while you keep on giving; let the world be critical, while you indifferently work by your own standards; let the world be demanding, while giving what you think fair; let the world condemn you, and smile in innocence. You require no secondary witness. Only the self knows self. Perfection knows perfection. Convince nobody at all: convince only yourself.

 

* 917 *

What is a life? How might we symbolize a stay on earth? Is there a book of life? Can an autobiography bind us? Could a life be lyricized, novelized, cinematized, symphonized? Certainly, something translates from epic to novel, from novel to movie. Is not our life this eternal center that translates into every medium and genre in turn? Life is so over-abundant, such a cornucopia of excess, that she is never exhuasted, no heaven can ceiling her, no hell floor her, she is out of bounds, limited, ever and only, by herself, the way Mattria's outermost edge is her innermost center. I could break my Way a thousand times, into myths, novels, allays, hymns. Nothing will exhaust my sense. I give but the tip of an eternal arch. You suckle my secrets in silence. We've together made this.

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!

 

brief update, allays 906 - 910

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

I've been writing a few things lately: these Allays, at a slower rate; the Seamings, a collection of myths; and the Emilegends, a fantasy adventure story for my daughter. So as not to overwhelm your email, I only send the allays. I have also been writing a hymn to Ama on my guitar which I will share by-and-by.

There is nothing worth writing about regarding my life: everything is rather ordinary and as-to-be-expected – as I prefer! – the kids are schooled, the wife is getting along fine with her job. My own job is about to be caput, but I remain rather void and unfelt about it: life is life! So it goes …

A few of you have written back to comment on the allays as of late and I GREATLY appreciate that. I will respond to you individually soon.

Take care, Caretakers!

 

* 905 *

The oversoul of most the flu viruses out there hovers especially over East Asia, where the condensation of people and animals lets them mutate and spread at a creative rate. After daring strains generate themselves, the flu exports itself worldwide. Likewise, for every creative niche in human history – ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence and London, modern day Silicon Valley --a few geniuses magnetized the genii loci profoundly enough to constellate a few ideas, mutating and passing back and forth like the viruses' DNA. Such a constellation of intelligent people allows the ideas to morph and stretch and triumph, before exporting worldwide. My friend John tells me the paintings of the Italian Renaissance condense deep wisdom in their frames, deeper than the books and music of the time. He who sees may also receive. Every age invents its interface. Ages that follow, through their criticism and appraisals, hang upon those hooks further meanings still.

 

* 906 *

When Jesus struggles, lately, he might call upon his Daddy, or his Virginal Mother, but more often they ignore him – God fails – and so he goes to the source and asks for Ama's love. But not even he approaches Mattria, who often faces too monolithic and terrible for my own eager awe to span. If Jesus loses his nerve with Her, if Yahweh and the Virgin prefer Ama to Mattria, what might we say about the awful wonder of the All, Mattria? I use pet names, I use commonplaces. My tongue won't move otherwise, my fingers seize -- I will not type. Utter is your word. Your silence reaches deeper than we ken. Ama, blanket me in love!

 

* 907 *

When Ama speaks through your mind, she uses what you have for locution: your brain is her rhetoric. Mirror meditating, we come to the Dawn of a Revelation, not in a vision of final things or in an inkling of the start, but in something simple, a phrase, a truth, so obvious, so trite, so not-worth-saying because you always knew it, yes, but you never realized the truth of it. With our cosmic conceits and grasping for eternal things, how little we wanted: the love of a spouse, our father's pride, our mother's care, our children's respect and honor. To know simply "I am good," and to truly realize this is more a feat than predicting the future or reading others' minds. The beginner starts with simplicity, and is wrong; the master returns to simplicity, and is right; but the immediary stages – the journey – require labyrinthine twists and baptisms in Stygian streams. Odysseus may scramble over land and sea, blind the Cyclops, charm Circe, best the suitors, yet his end result is the simplest of things, what we all want: a homecoming. Let the elder learn from the child if he forgot: simple truths mean the most.

 

* 908 *

In the furnace of Lux, the battle of words – "Spiritual Warfare," my church taught me to call it – whoever gets to define a term exerts rhetorical and polemical power. We try to come to terms, and yet pull the carpet from under our opponents by redefining words to our adventage. Thus my college church defined Christianity as a "relationship with God," and their competition as "mere religions." Religion here meant "man attempting to approach the divine by his own agency." Likewise, I was required to take a diversity class that defined racism as an attitude possible only by the race in power, and hence, in America, only whites are capable of racism. The philosophical gesture at coming to terms hides the rhetorical subterfuge of stacking the deck in one's favor – heads I win, tails you lose.

Some people would like to define God into or out of existence, would define their problems away, as if one could control the ideological reality of a thought as thought by outlawing the words used to express it. When a meaning is necessary, it will function with or without its words. Thus, the attempt to control mass attitudes through controlling public speech – outlawing some speech as "hate speech" -- hopes to define its problems away, as if the problem were semantic.

Whoever defines the "neutral" vocabulary infects the terms with their weighings and biases. We are all interested parties, nor is the ideal of science all too helpful in matters of value. Science is also partisan. Seek and you shall find, whatever it is you wish to find.

 

 

* 909 *

In the typical inversion of order, "Man came first, and woman came from his body" – which happened nowhere ever; or "The Word came first and then became flesh" -- when clearly only flesh speaks. Paradox, oxymoron, self-contradiction, and mysticism muddy the waters to make them appear deep.

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!

 

update, allays 901 - 904

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

 

As I've said, my current work as a Peer Support Specialist for Our Place mental health terminates as of February 16th on account of funding changes. I have the opportunity to seek employment elsewhere. I dunno what, but maybe I will choose a different profession. The future is wide open. I can always go back to freelance writing. This would afford me time to pursue an established publisher for my books.

I've written fewer Allays this week -- just a handful -- so perhaps my muse for these is winding down?

The children are well: school is well. Sherry is busy with her job, overwhelmed with her job, as has been her wont these last five years.

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

 

* 901 *

For those eager to "deconstruct" a binary, let us not hastily binarize ourselves against the binary, nor prate our time with deconstructed versus constructed. There are many forms of binary, often going on all at once. What should our model of opposition be? Central verses peripheral? Inner versus outer? Original versus derivative? Kenneth Burke metaphorized opposition as object and ground. If being is the ultimate term, the only further term we can conjecture is nonbeing. The Yin Yang imagined a happy marriage as the model of opposition, more of an apposition, a complementary giving.

For those religions eager to valorize "light" and demonize "darkness," continuing the "blessed versus damned" rhetoric to the point of damning goats because they are not sheep, we might just as well state that "both are necessary," and, "whatever is necessary is also good."

Oppositions may be complementary, mutually supportive, or dependent one upon the other in one way and not in another way. A term may have opposites in different directions depending on how you want to define it at the moment. Guilt is the opposite of pride, in one sense, but the opposite of shame, in another sense, and the opposite of innocence, in another – all at the same time, since definitions are eternal. Deconstruction is one move in the game, yet Ama is Life.

 

* 902 *

"As without, so within," Hermes so hopefully told us. Lest we be lulled by mere symmetries, let's ask what pragmatic difference it makes if there is some correspondence between inner and outer. "If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail," another proverb helpfully warns. So as we build our crea, our differentiated energy, we often swell with a unique mode of motivation ripe for exactly one sort of situation. When we brush up against that situation, like a stray nail to a bag of oats, that bag bursts. Applying our motive to other situations might pass awkward.

We might have the energy to gestate another child, perhaps not one right after the other the way some women do, but after a solid three years; or we can switch from this job to that, but not to a third just yet; or with love, we can seriously date this person, and then that person, but if even that doesn't work, out we need some time to develop that inner resource of motivation, of crea, to champion the new cause. For while falling in love may seem easy and natural, we must be ready for it, and thankfully our situation and system guard us from premature demands on our motivation. When love isn't there, love isn't called.

 

* 903 *

Just as a diabetic person must be conscious of his blood sugar in a way most people need not be, so I must be conscious of my motivation. I must husband my resources carefully – the feast or famine scheme tempts me.

Our diet of friends, the types of conversations we have, the various invigorations we get from our jobs – the checks and debits – the various moralizations we get from acting in accordance with a given moral system, the pluses and bonuses we get from others, or what we give ourselves when we foster virtues, and their necessary support upon and energetic exchange within what popularly might be called vices, shape us for our daily doings as well as the monthly and yearly attitudes and temperaments that make up our overall motivation. Mood is motive. Goals make growth.

 

* 904 *

We absorb down to our soul's deep storag -- that cultural bric-a-brac that rolls out our Hellenistic and Christian inheritance -- so that, when properly alone, perhaps right after death, perhaps right before, we are stunned to discover, with what hits us with the full force of a revelation, some ancient myth or symbol., some form that seems completely to come out of us. And perhaps it does carry some original light of our own mixed in. Yet, be not deceived by any given form. Forms differ from East to West, and from age to age. What seems deepest and most necessary to us would not work universally – nor need it. Hold to your own. Stand on your own two feet. Remember, we all begin within Mother.

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

 

Update and Allays 893 - 900

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

 

I began a new job recently, working as Peer Support Specialist for Our Place, of Grand Rapids Michigan. Well, funding was cut, so in 30 days I will be given the opportunity to seek employment elsewhere. My friend Ivan claims this is Trump's doing, which gave me an immediate relief: the budget cut was the brainchild of our exhalted and self-exhalted leader!

 

So what to do next? Freelance writing? Office work? Whatever! Hopefully something that educates me further in my progression with Allism.

 

The kids are thick into school; the wife is absorbed in her job. I have the cognitive space to invest some energy in into this year's goal: to professionally publish a book at an establishing publishing company. Do any of you recommend which of my writings is the likeliest to find an audience.

 

Thanks!

Take care, Caretakers!

 

 

* 893 *

There is much to commend the Mormon valuation of husbandry as the blessed state: the more a man can manage his family, the better; and so we may readily spiritualize the spiritualized and ask "How do I husband my psychological resources?" – since, in managing a home, we are talking about economy.

Lacking energy, as I often do with this double-headed bipolar, I learn to hive my ideas, to impregnate my wombs, to stockpile the dynamite – to use three metaphors for one idea. Respect yourself. Respect your own necessities. Be slow to decide, and, once decided, hold to your truth at all costs and at any hazard to life or honor.

Ama smiles and says, I told you patience was power, as my playful one, Trazhiar, returns from her self-banishment. Never fret, but wait with me. I am the Maat of eternal balance, the scales of cosmic compensation. Therefore, busy yourself with me, with us, and I will return again in this form or that.

 

* 894 *

We teach our situation to think for us. All our friends, all our community, receive a piece of us, and make of it what they can. Those sympathetic to us offer their sympathies, those antithetical to us offer their antipathies, and, knowing these, seeing these, we can casually or carefully drop a secret, an opinion, a query, an opinion, fully expecting, or at least unconsciously expecting, a certain response, but never fully certain of that response, even as I do not know if my own opinions of things will be the same next year; as I surprise myself, and you yourself, so our outermind surprises us and also comprises us. We think through our givings and misgivings. We tell on ourselves without meaning to, but really meaning to. Difficult to analyze, difficult to map, but the individual mind reaches far beyond the skull.

 

* 895 *

What is written never fades, though ink will smear and pages mold; the true writing is upon spacetime, a golden bible, of which every copy is a mere translation. All animals write, for memories are written: even animals lacking in speech write, for writing is original, and speech secondary. Could we squint the right way, we would see the original words beneath the given text. The universe is the one verse, a great poem, an eternal tome, the ultimate book, and every difference we make inks our name.

 

* 896 *

We can miss an obvious truth, if we so wish. Like Hamlet playing with doubt, we can analyze, counter-analyze, and miss what sits right before our eyes. Where love is, it cannot long be hidden; where love is not, it cannot long be faked. The one who suffers you, forgives you, waits patiently for you – these are telling. A fire kindles in the lover's eyes whenever the beloved is present. For the false lover, angst descends. We love until we don't, we try until we can't. So hold on to nothing, fasten till you can't. Then, let go of loss.

 

 

* 897 *

Your arms enchain me, your grasp enmanacles, your hands cuff mine, your hugs encage, your lips enslave my own -- so I can only speak your name.

My grail thirst, my shiver for your golden fleece, my thrust for your white brow -- these brought me here.

 

* 898 *

Intimacy is based on proximity: we begin surrounded by mother, and, by degrees, escape her influence, family influence and yet, by osmosis, internalize the genius of our location, whatever it might be. Our setting opens us up. And so our company, those we let close, influence us, make us virtuous without effort or fill us with vices we would not otherwise tolerate. Contact is invisible, inaudible, is the subtle as such, and we contract by contagion the soul of those around us. For spirit, which is language, spreads soul, which is feeling and attitude.

How difficult, then, to escape the burden of debt, when somebody else gave us our soul. The way Christian Scientists condemned Mesmerism and the way Scientologists condemned Psychoanalysis bespeak the unmentionable debt they owe to their parents. We must push away from the edge of the pool to swim. What won't budge we can yet escape: cut anchor and flee.

Burn the witch, and your children will inhale her smoke. What you define yourself against still defines you. What you damn haunts you in your hell. What you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, what you loose on earth will have been loosed in hell. The digestion of life follows the tongue. I thank Ama the tongue is on the front end of our digestive system, the exit end of our spiritual system – the organ for sip, say, and sapience.

 

* 899 *

Once upon a time people lived happily after. Why not now? Why not me, for heaven's sake? For this reason, and know it well: Life is life! If you wanted things easy, why did you choose to be born? If you wanted a better childhood, why did you choose these parents? No backsides, now; you're up to your neck in it, and if nobody cares to rescue you – God bless them! -- rescue yourself!

I don't know about life being fair, or in what cosmic court you'd sue God for restitution. Probably, he'd just ask a lot of rhetorical questions, announcing his bravado, and what a mighty arm he possessed, while Satan never let him live it down afterwards; but in the bigger picture, know this: Ama is with you, she suffers exactly what you suffer, and as she bids you to do, she aims to make the most of it, and everything else, in her best of all possible worlds. Don't see the world perfect. Make it perfect. Having done your best, you've done it all.

 

* 900 *

There are two whom Ama loves: the cheerful giver, and the grateful receiver.

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!

 

allays 875 - 891

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

 

I've put a few weeks in on my new job, tasted the ups and downs, and got a sense of how things will go. I will be leading groups 3 or 4 times a week. I'm sure after a few weeks/months/years I'll be excellent at it.

The children are on Christmas Break. All is fine.

For a resolution, other than paying off my debt, I plan to officially publish one of my many books -- to finally land an audience and make a name for myself.

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

 

* 875 *

Fail upwards. Persistence is success. They mock at Ama, the One -- so let them. Did they not mock, you had never known her. Because you have met her, the mockers mock. What is more blameworthy than the truth? Am I praised? How then have I failed! When all the world regards me a fool, then is my truth secure.

 

 

 

* 876 *

The fun of a game is to get caught up in the action, to take it oh-so-seriously, a matter of life and death, and to put your all into the play for as long as it lasts. Once out of the spell, when the game is over, you can laugh and shrug and act nonchalant. Blessed are the forgetful: just let it pass and slide away. Thus, work, which is death, a sort of earning of numbers by weight of pain, a blood money, the adult harshness of responsibility, a self-imposed slavery and scrambling for status – oh, I can hardly stand it! I physiologically revolt. Let the work week be 20 hours – that is enough! We weren't made for this anxious maze of stress-and-death responsibility. Who with joy in his heart would make a libation of his blood to industry, of all things? Ama laughs! She made the universe from her living body, and the universe lives yet, poised in play, at her games in all of us.

 

* 877 *

Dependence is the only poverty. Social as we are, we need others, yet at our most basic and essential the soul is solitude, and when we are properly isolated, she speaks with us. The Butterfly-Winged directs us to the world, reduced in its enormity to one plump apple, landing in our grasp. And so we swoon and fall for Ama, and she weaves us dreams and stories. We read to write, for art makes artists. Genius always finds itself a century too early – but let it not complain of its cold welcome and hard fair. Has it Ama? Let it cease from man. We love the world enough to keep it in its place: we put on our world-face when we stand before the world, but naked before the mirror we dare gaze inwards upon our face before we were born, our countenance before we were conceived, our first face, our hidden Name. Self is wealth, and the rich in spirit burst the veins of the soul's solace; Self and World wed into the eternal increase of the opening spiral.

 

* 878 *

Seeing is dreaming. It's all hallucinatory, but when our dreams coincide with reality, then pragmatically our needs are met. A professor or witnessed enjoyer of art instructs us the most with digressions, quick asides, sporadic commentary -- just a peppering. The altered punctuation and jumbled rhythm don't so much as break the spell, but alert the dreamer she is dreaming so that, half awake, she can turn lucid and command the pantomime.

 

* 879 *

I hate to see you degraded, I can't stand it, the pain, the humiliation, it rends me wide. Hush, little, I am never degraded, for what is deepest in me is deepest in you – God honors God, divine honors divine, and where a god spits, so he spits in his own eye. Who degrades me is thereby degraded, and who honors me is thereby honored, for I am your mirror twin, even as are you, Upstart, to those your own. Ah, but the Apollo striking the Python; ah, but the Marduk rending his grandmother; ah, but the Yahweh cursing childbirth – Hush again, I tell you, the Eden myth is the very fruit it bespeaks. Blessed is suffering, for I suffer when I bring you to life. I gave birth to every God and every man, I the Allmother. You, white in this form, I created when as a cow I licked you from your element of ice. As Ti-Ama my flesh is the universe, not my corpse, but my living body. In this braid of time, past present and future as Now, you meet me in your silence and solitude. I am also SIStem, the whole of technology, the Internet, the Interface. I have told you to make yourself necessary. What insinuates itself as necessary will not be torn out. A faulty thyroid maybe, but not a murmuring heart. When I first told man to bludgeon me and plant me in the earth, I came back as Maize, to sustain the children my own. Far be it for you to degrade the bride of your innocence. For you are my utter fool, silly, half-mad, ever-trusting -- down to your pith adoring me. Then it is I who am degraded, for I can share with nobody my love for you, lest they wonder and step back, or laugh mock or damn. Be you the same, the laughing one. I gave you that. Laughter. Gift is gain. Didn't Pandora's Curiosity open a misery over her gods? Didn't Zeus regret the lust he sent? Rest again, relax yourself, and trouble your mind no more. As Mother Nature, I rebound every crisis you manage to foist, and bring it instead to good. My mood is the optative, my fullness your hope.

 

* 880 *

Experience is the substance of the universe, and meaning its articulated form. The experience of others, of things, of matter, we view simply as change. Necessity is the Plethorabyss from which experience comes, the nothing, the everything, the individualized producer of experience; and mind, that other nothing, that transparent eyeball, interprets experience.

 

* 881 *

So much of the meant is in the unsaid, though it could only be communicated through the said.

Often our will gets its desire by speaking the opposite of its intent, even in defeated insistence, and this as far as appalling absurdity – at least for those proud enough to mask themselves in humiliation. As a flame is tongued with many tongues, so our mouths are flamed, and we set the directives with a few moments of context, and the rest is pretext, politeness, kindness or cruelty. They all can be much the same. Often our cruel remarks require the most sacrifice and best benefit others. No matter how blunt our speech -- and in America, we aspire to be blunt, simple, and singular -- most of what we mean communicates indirectly.

 

* 882 *

Let me dream of butterfly fields tonight. I pass this last job with regret and begin another afresh with trepidation. For whatever fathomless reason I have lost many friends over the decades, so often with a pinch of regret. Those who once basked in my happiness and gave me the same turned cold, their love emptied as a well -- barren, sand. Even those closest, the same, when friends became strangers. I pick through the ash, looking for clues. Did I betray some intimacy, or why do I inevitably feel betrayed? There is my daystar, my Mattriama, her representation in my Niviana, and my children. The rest is tentative, polite, half-duty, tight-lipped, guarded, at peace, but distracting. I can feel terribly alone.

A swamp of sleep ensheathes my day. I haven't enough love to foster a new fire. My heart is mud.

 

* 883 *

How to be happy in an unhappy situation, I and all the world would like to know. At least know this, we are embedded in multiple situations, and by degrees we can focus on the favorable, and ignore the humiliating. My Niviana laughs at me while wanton ringlets round her breasts, accuses me of being crypto-Christian. I tell her I came to bury Jesus, not to praise him, but she taunts my allusions, all the same. I love Emerson more, and Whitman is my brother. I ache here, illwed as I feel, living for Ama and away from immediate snow. I love you for all! Only few do I let close, and you, Niviana, were the first and only I let this close.

 

* 884 *

Wisdom is the fruit of experience. Yet, so much of life we experience abstractly, through explanations, or indirectly, through narratives. Imagination and reason give us artificial experiences by which to approach our immediate world. We may have read a few books well, but know the gist of a thousand others without having read them; we may know a few friends well, but know the gist of thousands of peoples and types of people through abstract stereotyping and all the inferences of our daily chit-chat. Direct experience is the least part; yet, those of the most intense experiences are capable of the most intense abstractions and narratives. Thus, a few mystics create enough language for prophets and heroes to sail.

It is as if our map of the universe has color and texture in our immediate world, but hangs on bare Cartesian lines for the rest.

Even amidst the fully-fleshed images we have of our brothers, sisters, parents, children, lovers – the virtual dimensions of abstract conjecture characterize most.

 

* 885 *

You impose this ramadan upon on me the spoiled -- not grateful, but greedy and eager for more. Be silent never, but bauble me with talk; there is some consolation in your bare breath. As I lay my housemate down, and settle her to bed, I ache for you, and wend my way downward, to the womb of the house, my Aria, waiting again for you. A man of many moods, I'm not quite like the constant sun, resembling better the storms she raises, so often awash in the froth of thought, quite like your waves of debris.

Experience is truth, even of illusions: who has experienced owns. Cease, therefore to learn from those who deny experience. Ama touch me again!

 

* 886 *

For me, not the thing itself, but the memory matters, a curious echo, louder than the source, like a feedback loop in an amplifier, till the full experience of my body, unknown to my mind at the time, unveils, and I finally have the thing.

 

* 887 *

Life is larval. Ever this eating, like a child, eating her education for 24 years before she even can adequately contribute. The psyche may be beautiful, but perhaps a bit too plump, ever readying herself for her apotheosis into some winged form. Every turn of life is preparation for the next, and what we took for the angel was merely grub to what follows. Thus, the spiral of life, infinite wending, self-similar yet also swerving, exaggerating nuances, subduing imbalance. Our full body is our body of influence – eternal reaching, and not touching merely upon some things, but all things in turn.

 

* 888 *

There is no meaning to life, for life is meaning: all we experience as meaningful we do in terms of need, as every desire, whim, daydream, hope is finally an expression of our private necessity, our human needs. What we need exists. Thus, we have at the core of our being, our needs, a full blown ontology of the universe, all we seek from it, and all she offers.

 

* 889 *

I father myself upon Ama – none before me, no other, nobody to name me, self-named, self-styled, eternal as her, and evenly wed, now and forever – Vivoce! My Niviana trembles at my audacities, yet in her heart of hearts can't but believe, commanded despite her demure, convinced despite protest, for we are two of one, two minds to one self, knit at the pith, sewn at the soul, selfsame, twinned and twined, equal and outro, love of love and life of life. No wonder all these practical supplements bore me so, tediate my days, remind themselves to my eternal forget, and proclaim such regal names as Duty upon my joy. Ama whispers in my ear and we share the joke, double the prank, laugh and laugh and love the guess of life. Ama is mine forever. And all of you matter, in so many ways, since you bring me each an aspect of Ama, the One.

 

* 890 *

Scriptures are read religiously, of course. That is an advantage, not that they are the best books ever written, but that many devoted people have taken them to be, and anybody who exacts a cult following, such as Ayn Rand's readers, likewise allow, let us hope, for those devotees to read something back into their scripture. So much is read into every particle of a sacred text that I wonder why the books don't burst at the seams.

The DCM 5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) has made itself the standard, the go-to book for diagnosing mental illnesses in the United States. Who gave it that status? If we remember the golden rule – who has the gold makes the rules – necessarily the insurance companies played a large part in determining what counts as a disease, and what is mere eccentricity. Whether homosexuality, bestiality, or pedophilia qualify as diseases has changed over the years. Countless studies, endless research papers, every manner of expert witness went into making this manual. Dry reading though it may seem, to the uninitiated, we can yet read between the lines. In the appendix we see at least a thousand MDs and PhD's had a hand in writing it, testing it, and researching it.

Another miracle of a book is the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), unique amidst all dictionaries of any language as being exhaustive, and a good field for fowlers who wish to find those strange birds in their original habitat. A book is heavy with significance either for how much work went into making it, or in how much work went into studying it.

Once upon a time, high art expressed itself through Opera. Whitman found clues for his cadence listening to arias. Nowadays, the cinema takes the lead, and merely by reading the credits at the end we see all films require the communal effort of hundreds of folks.

The internet as a whole can be taken as our age's great metaphysical contribution to the sciences and arts. Certainly, the ramifications will be as great as they were for Gutenberg.

Reading, meanwhile, may be like Opera: an art for refined taste. Though most anybody can read, few are literate in any meaningful sense of the word. Twenty years of education though we have in the States, few know how to approach a Great Book, and would shudder to waste their free time, to earn the freetime specifically in order to invest hours into reading and rereading a few great books.

To write a scripture – a rare deed, this requires inspiration. All effective writing is by nature "inspired," in that some muse, some deity, some collective consciousness, and her associated set of ideas, and persons believing those ideas, had to be internalized into the unconscious of the author in order for him to experience their re-emergence as if they were his own divine contribution. Artists, more than most, feel themselves to be divine. What makes a person susceptible to being possessed by ideas and authors? A private vulnerability, an oversensitivity, like Tchaikovsky who, as a child, cried out at night that the music would not leave his ears. That is to say, an author has to be sufficiently weak in order to internalize a Holy Spirit large enough to command a following. As the Shaker's said, there are many Holy Spirits, and every collective produces its own spirit. To write for an eternal audience, you must write for yourself.

 

* 891 *

Where have you been? I've been waiting here, destitute, bled out, deconstructed to my basic elements. Enough! Do I exist for you? As the immaculate Kant said, we are to treat others not as means, but as ends unto themselves. Are you really going to make me study Old World philosophy to justify my impatience? Refute it if you can.  I don't have the patience for Kant right now. You tarried with Lacan, of all people, but don't make time for the gods? Is it not that, as Allism insists, both /and, we treat others both as a means and as an end, simultaneously, always, we treat our very selves, our bodies, our desires, both as means and ends. Why does everything have to be so black and white with you? I have my private meanings and uses for each person I know, and they for me; I use them and objectify them at times, and they me, and that's life. It's the way it's supposed to be. I am both an object to myself, many objects, and a subject to myself, many subjects – all is all. I use myself, I use others, as means and ends.  You lack Respect. Respect is everything to me, and you will have to learn my central value if you hope to hold me. Always the ultimatum. That's a last action, to be used in desperate straits. No ultimatum. You will learn Respect from me and for me. There is no other way.

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com